


Jonas is Gone

by KaiW7



Category: The Giver Series - Lois Lowry
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dystopia, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 05:42:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14302020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaiW7/pseuds/KaiW7
Summary: By now, Jonas and Gabriel have been gone for three weeks. Father finally understands why.





	Jonas is Gone

By now, Jonas and Gabriel had been gone for three weeks. For Father, it was three weeks of sleepless nights, desperately waiting for any news about his sons, painstakingly searching every nook and cranny of the community before the Elders stopped the search and began the Ceremony of Loss. 

Father and his family unit had been some of the first to receive memories. It had started with a few innocuous memories, but quickly snowballed into a community-wide disaster. First, Lily started seeing color everywhere. The sky, the bushes, the buildings, the people, Lily saw color in them all. She tried to point the color out to her friends and family, but at the beginning, nobody else could see. Lily excitedly told her friends about her vivid dreams of rainbows and mountains, how her big brother Jonas was right and there really were animals. They called her an animal, accused her of being delusional, and Lily had to be taken away by the Doctors for treatment. 

Father tried to talk to the Receiver and convince him to help Lily, but the Receiver refused to talk to anybody. Mother waited at the Annex well past curfew, eventually banging on the Receiver’s door screaming “Lily needs your help and you refuse to do anything about it! She isn’t the only one, plenty of others see color too! People like me! You are supposed to receive memories, aren’t you? Why don’t you come out of your dwelling and help Lily receive all the memories that you should be receiving?” 

Mother got taken too. 

Next, Father started dreaming, not only of color, but also of things he had never seen in his life. He dreamed that he saw through another’s eyes. Father dreamed of oceans, weirdly shaped fish; mountains, tall and towering, covered in plants; deserts, covered in rocks. Father dreamed of a family, _love_. Father woke up in a cold sweat. 

Father didn’t tell anybody else, but these strange occurrences started happening more often, until most of the community was plagued by disquieting dreams. The Elders told the worst cases to go to the Receiver of Memory for help, but the man was overworked, and turned away many. 

Father knew he should go to the Receiver for help, since he had been having these dreams for weeks now. But he didn’t. Instead, he thought. Now, he understood. Jonas left because he wanted to save Gabe from release, which Father now knew meant death. 

Father knew that he had failed Jonas, had killed many newchildren. 

He knew it was his fault that Jonas had to leave, that the memories threw the community into disarray. He knew that everybody blamed him for the chaos Jonas caused, that they thought he should be released. 

He knew what he had to do. Father applied for release.


End file.
